Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It

"A stimulating history of how the imagination interacted with its sibling psychological faculties—emotion, perception and reason—to shape the history of human mental life."—The Wall Street Journal

To imagine—to see what is not there—is the startling ability that has fueled human development and innovation through the centuries. As a species we stand alone in our remarkable capacity to refashion the world after the picture in our minds.
 
Traversing the realms of science, politics, religion, culture, philosophy, and history, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reveals the thrilling and disquieting tales of our imaginative leaps—from the first Homo sapiens to the present day. Through groundbreaking insights in cognitive science, Fernández-Armesto explores how and why we have ideas in the first place, providing a tantalizing glimpse into who we are and what we might yet accomplish. Unearthing historical evidence, he begins by reconstructing the thoughts of our Paleolithic ancestors to reveal the subtlety and profundity of the thinking of early humans. A masterful paean to the human imagination from a wonderfully elegant thinker, Out of Our Minds shows that bad ideas are often more influential than good ones; that the oldest recoverable thoughts include some of the best; that ideas of Western origin often issued from exchanges with the wider world; and that the pace of innovative thinking is under threat. 

• The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes
• The Oxford Illustrated History of the World
• Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought
• A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
• Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition
• The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
• The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
• A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life
• Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: Thirty Years of Complexity Thinking at the Santa Fe Institute
• The History of Philosophy